Desert

... or the longest 702 miles of the trail

The desert isn’t long because it’s the desert, it’s long because it’s the first part. It’s the part where I learned the habit of walking, where I was figuring out routines and everyone I met was someone new. My footwear was wrong. My resupply strategy was wrong. I carried too much water or not enough. I seemed to struggle with even the basics of setting up and breaking camp. Even the rhythm of my days, which should have come natural, was wrong. I questioned everything I did from my wake-up time to what I ate and how I pissed. I had entered a new world, one beyond my ken , and had to learn how to be the trail version of myself. And of course I began a long association with pain.

The desert is beautiful, they don’t tell you that. They tell you it’s dry and desolate and to be avoided. They don’t tell you how desert flowers bloom bright and delicate against the spiny brown, how arbitrary the distinction between weeds and not-weeds.

I asked other hikers how they liked their shoes and what kind of socks they wore. I exchanged blister remedies and stretching exercises and nothing worked all that well. I began to pop ibuprofen like Tic Tacs and wished I had something stronger. The reality is that thru-hiking is not natural. Nowhere in human history did people get up and walk 25-30 miles a day while carrying food, water, and shelter for 2000 plus miles. It’s an extravagant use of calories and there just wouldn’t have been need to. Nomads might walk from area to area in search of food or safety, but not like a thru-hiker walks. Our bodies are not meant for it, but they will mostly adapt to handle the strain and adaptation hurts.

Here. In the present. It’s post-trail depression, it’s a drug addict being denied his endorphins and dopamine, it’s the inevitable let down after any big thing is done. I've been buying silly crap on Amazon, I've been looking for an apartment and looking at funny cat videos, I've been drinking too much and sleeping too much and not writing or thinking enough. The other day I met a friend of my hosts, she’s an artist and I sat at the table with them smoking weed and drinking box wine and I could not think of a single thing to say. I sat staring at the table, awkwardly smiling at things others said and only managed the weak anemic mutterings of a thoroughly boring person. I can hear Rachel’s voice in my head, “Be gentle with yourself, it’s ok to just relax, we’ve had a busier year than most people ever will.” But they are just words and words fail in the face of the emotional and the inexplicable.

It will pass, or it will evolve into something else and I’ll be fine but what remains to be seen is whether it will just be a thing I did once or if it will change me subtly and permanently.

The first day was a 20.6 miles water carry to Lake Morena. Maybe a dozen of us started and I didn’t see many of them ever again. It was an older crowd for the most part, people who wanted a little more time and started a few weeks earlier than recommended. It was a hard first day but I congratulated myself on making it in a little over 10 hours. My thoughts that day turned toward trying to understand why I was on the trail.

My first journal entry: ‘You can know yourself best when you are beaten thin against a smooth rock and left in the sun to dry. There’s a reason so many religions come from the desert. It’s the feeling of apartness I come to so easily. This tells me, if nothing else does, I belong to this’. I wish I could say I continued this thread of deeper thinking but the act of walking supplanted much thought for some time. The next morning I walked down the wrong trail for half an hour and decided not to be upset. The trail is well-marked except where it isn’t and I had forgone the convenience of a smartphone and it’s associated GPS apps in favor of escaping technology for awhile.

The next day I went about 18 miles and camped near Toto, a man my age who’d hiked the AT the year before and calls Kansas home. He was the first hiker I met who I would continue to see throughout the walk. Forty-two miles in I sent my Kindle home and replaced my shoes in an attempt to deal with blister issues.

I met Larb before Scissors Crossing, I limped and tried to keep up with him as he rattled off questions. “Hi, what’s your name?where are you from?why are you out here?” I was taken aback. His questions seemed almost intrusive until I realized I was carrying with me the cautious wariness of that other world, the one I’d left a few days before. I sensed that same caution in others later on when I found myself rattling questions off to a day hiker or someone giving me a ride into town.

By mile 77 I was dealing with wincing knee pain and took a nero (NEar zeRO mile day) in Julian to try and rest it. I managed to hobble to the library where a few Google searches gave my pain a name, ilio-tibial band syndrome. An overuse injury common to endurance athletes and a phrase that would define many hundreds of miles for me. The recommended treatment is, of course, rest. The hitch out of town was (like most of my hitches) difficult, it took me two hours to get back to the trail which left me climbing up into the San Felipe Mountains just as the day warmed. The trail contoured around exposed canyons and even after 10 hours of walking I could look over my left shoulder and see where I’d started the day. Unsure of trail etiquette I skipped a small campsite to give the couple setting up there some privacy and paid for it by having to walk into the night to find another spot big enough to fit my sleeping pad.  Leaving Julian I’d told myself to take it easy, keep miles low, and there I was setting up in the dark after 24 miles, my longest day thus far.

Writing the trail. Trying to find words for it. Trying not to think about all the hassles of modern life. Trying to come to terms with the months that felt like years but now seem like dreams. I need to find an apartment, I need to register my car and change my address. I don’t want to be back on the trail, I’m bone tired and my body has much healing to do. But I don’t want to be here either. The trail was hard but simple. Offtrail is easy but complicated. Two thousand seven hundred fifty miles, a lifetime that passed like a tornado and dropped me here.

I limped into Warner Springs (mile 109) and contemplated my situation. I was about 1/26^th the way done and could barely walk. I wondered what I was even doing out there and if there was any point in continuing. Before the trail I had been driving trucks in North Dakota and had been on exactly one backpacking trip in the previous 25 years, not exactly the best preparation for hiking a long trail. I felt a connection with all the restless people I’d been meeting, like I belonged, but the spirit of this magical thing was crumbling in the face of my physical limitations. I tried to imagine how it would feel to go back to KC, to return after just a week. I’d always been careful to speak of the trail with a shrugging smile, ‘Well, I’ll give it a shot, see what happens, most who start don’t finish.’ The truth was this was a dark dream for me, my version of a midlife crisis and I needed a win.

I’d been living wrong for a long time, longer than I’d even admit to myself. I struggled to read more than a few times a month and I’d all but ceased writing anything but to-do lists or pithy Facebook posts, instead spending spare time watching bad sitcoms or browsing Amazon. Now and then, in an over-caffeinated rush of self-improvement I’d write out a new life code or download internet-blocking productivity software or change my screensaver to some motivational saying (How you spend your days is how you spend your life!) and within a week I'd shrug off the self-imposed guilt trip and get back to bad habits and addictions.  This walk, at first just a grand adventure, had become a chance to reboot from a life that left me feeling soul-sick and empty.

I met DishCloth, BLT, and UB and listened in intently as DC and UB talked about their previous failed attempts. Their eyes took on a haunted look when they recounted all the time between then and now, how a subconscious voice nagged at them from the moment they quit the trail. It was a conversation I’d think about often.

The next morning most hikers had walked on. I sat by myself for hours in a dingy plastic chair under a cottonwood tree and stared angrily at the ground and at my feet. I nodded politely to other hikers and kept to myself. I weighed my desires against my fears and came up with a mantra that saw me through this and many other difficult times on the trail: Whatever It Takes.

I did some more research online and found a sort of knee brace for IT band syndrome, examining a picture of it I realized I could mimic it with the ace bandage I’d been carrying. I ordered toe socks for my blisters, and double checked the maximum daily dosage of ibuprofen. And then I refilled my water bottles, packed up, and set out limping and resolute into the afternoon sun.

So I'm sitting here at my friend’s house while football plays in the next room.  It’s been a few weeks since I stepped off trail and I am no closer to understanding what  those 140 days mean. I’m very tired and my feet still hurt even though my primary activity has been laying around catching up on the TV I missed. I look down and see chiseled calves, scarred shins, and untied shoes. I avoid phone calls from friends who will ask me how it was or what it was like but really want to know if it changed me. All these questions scare me, though I'm not sure exactly why.

I made it only six miles out of Warner Springs and camped at Agua Caliente. There I met three college friends, Raffiqi, Bearsnack and Emily. I sat with them and smiled at their inside jokes and knew I’d made the right decision. Just before dark a mother/daughter team came by, GBH and Hot Mess. I remember even then, amidst the day’s failing light and my personal worries how Hot Mess’s smile caught my eye and left me wanting to know more of her. At 5AM the next morning her screeching alarm went off and then again every ten minutes for the better part of an hour. The two of them would end up playing a very large part in my walk, for better or worse.

The days passed tentatively, I walked and figured out a rhythm for this life. Three ibuprofen as soon as I woke, a breakfast of cold oatmeal and Snickers bars, try to make it 3 hours before my first break. I learned my body as a machine, how the interplay of food, water, and rest can dictate the state of my soul, how the machine can be run ragged day after day and produce a sort of trance-like momentum as a result. The trail doesn’t make a body stronger any more than the road makes a car stronger, instead it begins a slow deterioration which must be monitored and repaired as necessary. Certain systems can be allowed to fail; a sprained wrist is ok, I don’t walk on my wrist; chafe, sore back, and headaches are painful, but won’t end a walk. If the basic structure of the walking body is sound and there are calories to burn, the walk will continue.

I learned to not trust the opinions of others regarding things like water sources, distances, and weather forecasts. I learned to estimate my water needs in miles per liter. I learned to dread high use areas of the trail where blazes disappeared and teenagers came to escape the watchful eyes of naysaying adults. I learned to ignore the well-meaning locals with their warnings of murderous mountain lions, terrible serpents, and swarms of bears, all of whom, apparently, had a taste for human flesh. The theme of these warnings can be summed up as “the outdoors is trying to kill you and you should be terrified”.

Not all the locals were to be avoided. In Warner Springs I met Heinz, an old German man and we discussed the state of the world and politics and found that despite our widely varied world experience, we agreed on nearly everything. I met a young man managing a diner in Big Bear, CA who was working on his masters degree in Spanish literature and we discussed Borges and Bolano. I met Nona-From-Nowhere, a triple crown hiker doing a day hike outside of Idylwild and within 5 minutes of meeting her she had given me her address in Vancouver; she wouldn’t be there around the time I finished the trail, she said, but the key is hidden under the doormat and I should make myself at home. Over and over I was caught in foolish assumptions by humble and decent people.

I met hikers as I went, some I would see again and again, others would disappear ahead of me or behind. Days passed and my knee had begun to feel better, some days I managed on less than half the maximum dosage of ibuprofen. Now and then I would go a day without my wrap and the next morning would bring the familiar twinge of weakness. It wasn’t until Tehachapie that I was able to forgo the wrap completely, around 600 miles after it’s first use.

I’m writing this in an 8^th floor loft overlooking downtown Kansas City. I have a cup of coffee with cream and sugar, a desk and a chair, and the climate control is on the warm side of ideal. There’s construction happening on the street below, backhoes and jackhammers and other tools of progress. I'm trying to remember how the trail felt, the texture and nuance. It’s difficult here where mowed grass and trimmed trees are ringed by concrete. People wrapped in the latest styles walk below in uncomfortable shoes carrying shopping bags. Cars zip effortlessly down the street and I predict which ones would give a hiker a ride into town. Not that pickup, it’s a company vehicle and HR has strict rules. That shiny black SUV? Of course not. Where’s the ubiquitous ten year old Subaru, windows layered with dust, back end plastered with stickers?

            By the time I made it into Kennedy Meadows, the point between the desert and the Sierra, I had found myself in a loose-knit group of fellow walkers that seemed to always be within a day or two. I walked alone mostly, camped with others often, and this suited me.

GBH, Hot Mess, and Jorge brightened many miles with their impossibly positive attitudes. I walked with Ryman, Iron Chef, and Oatmeal for long silent hours seasoned with random conversation. Breathless, Indy, Toto, Mountain Goat and Klutz, Larb and Jackrabbit, Keester and Hobbes, , Dawg and Tinker, DC and BLT all would pop up in town, on trail, in between. They were different in unimportant ways and alike in the ways that matter.

We had also collected a raft of stories. We’d walked through wind farms and poodle dog bush, baked by day and frozen by night, and made deep connections within moments of meeting. We gorged on town food, dreamt of hot showers, warm beds, and cold beer; but were always drawn back to the trail the way people are drawn back to an abusive relationship over and over.

At this point, seven hundred and two miles into it, I was feeling confident and accomplished and unable to wrap my mind around the realization that we had only done a quarter of the trail.

A handful of desert memories:

·      Cowboy camping, so so many times

·      A 2560 calorie meal at Cajon Pass McDonalds

·      Eating way too much taco salad at Casa de Luna

·      Beer and weed and laughing until my belly hurt at the Acton KOA

·      Doing my first 30 mile day and then doing another the next day, and no knee pain!